Creative Brief
Crafted Product
Essence Magazine: Top 50 Fiction Books
This project is collaborative and academic. The interactive accompanied an essay by the University of New Orleans Professor Jacinta Saffold, visualizing a legacy of bestselling writers in the Black community. I worked with archival data collections to design an interactive tool that enables readers to explore the topic for themselves.
Goal
- Create a simple interactive that would allow readers of Professor Saffold's essay to explore the top books on the Essence Magazine bestseller's list.
- This interactive would serve as a preview for a bigger, potentially grant-funded project to make this data, an important part of contemporary Black literature, accessible.
- The visualization in the tooltip allows the reader to get details on demand: track the number of books the author wrote that made it to the list, what issue the books appeared in, how expensive the book is, and whether or not it was paperback or hardcover. The tooltips allow the reader to link to a Wikipedia article about each author.
Role
My role: Data Visualization
- Jacinta Saffold, Professor, Researcher, Writer & Data Curator
Process
Discovery
Observations
In data visualization, simple bar charts often aren't used because they seem boring. But a well-designed bar chart isn't boring; instead, it helps the reader focus on the content precisely because it is so familiar. Because order mattered in this visualization, we decided that a simple hierarchical bar chart, with visualizations in the toolti[ps, would be an appropriate exploratory interactive to pair with the explanatory essay.
Professor Saffold and I had many conversations about this data because she was the lead on an NEH grant application for it, and I was on board with a networked team as a front-end designer. Although the grant was not approved, we learned from the experience and plan to submit another grant application.
The data was entered over a number of years, so there were several inconsistencies in how the data was entered.
For example:
- Triple Crown changes to Triple Crown Publishing
- William Morrow Co. changes to William Morrow
- Urban changes to Urban Books
- Touchstone changes to Touchstone Books
- Several authors either changed names or had inconsistent name entries. I also standardized these authors so they could be counted accurately.
Essence-books-jacinta-jbk-standardized-6-15-20.csv115.7KB
During my communications with Professor Saffold, I offered three options to visualize the data:
- Improve the graphic design of the treemap viz
- This would include Wikipedia links to the authors on the tooltips
- The problem with the treemap: you can only understand the smaller rectangles through the tooltip. To help the treemap more, I could try a dashboard option, so the user could filter according to year, allowing data to appear as needed rather than all at once...dashboard views could also include a timeline by year, so the user could see the order of books from 1994 onward.
- Use cards: like this tool from Flourish: https://flourish.studio/2019/10/17/cards-template/
- The cards would have an image of the book cover or author
- Text for times listed/retail price
- The drawback to this approach: I'd have to look up the 485 book cover/author images...or to make this more feasible, we only show images for top 20-50 book covers...For speed's sake, I'd probably use a private academic account for Flourish to make this. But that means I won't be able to dynamically link to the Wikipedia author pages from the cards. That's a Tableau feature.
- Convert the treemap into a table. It could be a searchable/filterable table, like the attached rough examples.
- Advantage of this approach: you could look up precise values without having to use tooltips.
- Information is clearly displayed and can embed charts inside of tables (such as the bar chart)
- This would include Wikipedia links to the authors on the tooltips
Concepts → Blueprint
Concepts
essence-top-50-table-rough-concepts-JBK.pdf2252.9KB
Blueprint
If this project was also presented in print, I would have imported the Tableau file into Adobe Illustrator to improve the styling. Yet interactives have more constraints so they can be readable across browsers. I like to use Tableau and the R Tidyverse as my Discovery → Concept → Blueprint tools.
